America's adult population is economically illiterate. College economics instruction must shoulder some of the blame for this situation. Forty percent of all college graduates take an economics course. Over 95 percent of principles of economics students do not continue on to major in economics, however. For them, introductory economics is a terminal course. To improve adult economic literacy the authors argue for replacing much of the detail and technical material in the traditional two-semester principles of economics course with a single semester introductory course that emphasizes basic concepts, repetitive practice applying those concepts to real circumstances, and active participation of students in the learning process. The goals of this course should be limited to developing a thorough understanding of basic economic principles such as scarcity, opportunity cost, trade-offs, marginal analysis, incentives, specialization, voluntary exchange, markets, prices as signals, and so on, at the expense of breadth. Twenty appropriate principles are identified in the 1997 Voluntary National Content Standards. The authors argue for omitting cost curves, most graphs, analysis of industry structures, elasticity and multiplier computations, and aggregate demand and aggregate supply analysis from the introductory course. .
